Lookie!

February 06, 2010

A mom in our homeschool group saw an installation in the Portland airport called the Portland Grid Project, where different photographers were given squares of a Portland map and invited to take eight photos to be arranged around the original piece of the map. The mom was inspired to do this for our home town, and our family is joining in! My quadrant included Drake Park, near downtown, and that's where I took all these photos. We have four more quadrants after this, though, so we should be kept busy for a while.

As you may or may not know, I'm currently a part of a Venturing Crew. Venturing is an off-shoot of Boy Scouts, for teenage girls and boys. I'm not really sure why I'm in the crew, seeing as they're all nearly complete opposites of me. But, I suppose it's good to get to know people with very different views! (They're all meat-eating, hunting, conservative, republican, Christian girls.) But anyway, we tagged along with the Boy Scouts to an event this year called Freeze-O-Ree. (Not very fondly renamed Freeze-Your-Rear by my friend and I.) Basically you go and camp in the snow. I guess I'm not much of a camper, because in my view these photos were the best thing to come out of Freeze-Your-Rear.

We got up before the sun had even risen, and I must say that if you're going to wake up before the sunrise then do it out in the middle of a snow-covered forest. It was beautiful! I grabbed my camera and took these photos while breakfast was being made. (Everyone took on a different meal; thankfully I had dinner.)

If I had just been thrown into that cold morning from some warmer place, I would have been miserable. However, I think I acclimated the night before and was relatively comfortable the rest of the time. I would say I probably went gloveless at least a quarter of the time (it's surprising how many things must be done with bare hands during the day) and though I knew my hands were cold somehow I didn't feel it. Plus, I'm typing this up as quickly as I think of what to write so I don't think there was any lasting damage.